Feminists write about mental health

Beyond Panic

I’m in the final 9 days of my final year of my degree. Just typing that is terrifying.

I have 3.5 thousand words to write for thursday evening and only scattered notes so far to show for it.

I have a final year project due on the 29th for which I’ve done little since January.

I am beyond panic. I can’t believe this is possible, but I’ve actually come out the other side of panic and landed in numbness, where I *know* how important all this is, but I can’t think about it, or feel the terrible urgency as immediately as I should, like some wierd self-preservation thing my mind has in place for horribly overwhelming situations. I’m through the looking glass here! I have to escape the chessboard defences of my own mind in order to shake myself awake, or some other convoluted metaphor I can’t quite be bothered to follow through.

At the beginning of this month I kind of had the right idea. Back then I was so anxious I couldn’t sleep unless I spent a really long time thinking about different ways of working out fractions (I am terrible at maths despite my grandfather being a mathematician, so this takes me ages). Back then whenever I closed my eyes I felt like I needed to find a 24-hour trepanning specialist to release the head pressure.
Now, though, I sleep to much. I take long lie-ins and feel tired during the day.
What the hell is wrong with me?

Like many of us with mental health stuff going on, I’ve failed a lot in the past at things which my peers seem to achieve as a matter of course. I won’t say effortlessly, but…yeah, actually, it seems pretty easy for them to finish degrees, and move out of home, and all that rite-of-passage stuff.
For me, up until at least 2007, my OCD has obstructed a great many of the things I’ve tried to do. I’ve dropped out of uni not once but twice (pre diagnosis), and I’m on the fourth year of this three year course.
Yet I’m still unbalanced. I’m still – and I hate to use the word so close to a deadline – failing. Handing in work late. Missing deadlines altogether. Failing to keep to schedules. But I don’t have the excuse of undiagnosed anxiety disorders this year. I’m on medication, and it’s helping. I’ve been seeing my psychologist for nearly 3 years.

I’m so scared of failing now that, apparently, I can’t even process the whole idea anymore.
I really like to think that we aren’t defined by our failures – that we can learn from mistakes and keep striving towards our goals – but that seems to apply to other people in my thinking, not me.

So, sorry for pouring all this angst onto you, I hope you are all well, and coping.
I’d love to hear from other people at uni/ studying, compare experiences, and maybe once this 9 days is over, compile some information/advice that other ‘mentally interesting’ (with thanks to Seaneen Molloy http://thesecretlifeofamanicdepressive.wordpress.com/ who’se blog is awesome) at uni could use to help them get through these hard bits.

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I just wanted to say that I’m in a very similar situation. I too have a final year project due in on 29th and need to do alot of work for it.

“I’ve failed a lot in the past at things which my peers seem to achieve as a matter of course. I won’t say effortlessly, but…yeah, actually, it seems pretty easy for them to finish degrees”

That resonated with me, I feel like I should be able to do this, other people can. I also feel like, when i get my degree, no one is going to know how much effort went into it. People are going to think that I got it because it was pretty easy… In reality I have battled depression and anxiety for most of my degree.

My only useful advice would be to think about your achievements. They may seem trivial in comparison to the things your peers are achieving, but to you they’re probably really significant.

My only support is my understanding of your situation. Due to mental health problems i was excluded from school twice, had to have my mum come to school with me to look after me, i just scraped through A Levels (mainly by luck), i’ve never sat in a ‘proper’ exam, i had to take a whole year out, i went to another college where i had a team of support workers and the management tried to have me excluded repeatedly, through that year i survived a series of suicide attempts, amazingly i passed my course and got uni offers, i moved 140 miles from home to go to uni, and now i’m at the end of the first year and i haven’t been to a lecture since before christmas, and i never managed to even make being a full-time student. I’ve only had one part-time job, and i’ve never been able to drive. My dad has had enough and would rather i didn’t come home, so i’m currently mid-way through ploughing through forms for housing and benefits.

It’s a battlefield full of mines. It’s so easy to define ourselves by our failures – my year out, how i didn’t complete my year at uni, that i can’t drive, that i have no money, that i technically don’t have anywhere to live. But i can look at the positives – i got past my phase of suicide attempts and severe self-harm without causing too many long-term problems and with the will to live, i’ve got A Levels and a diploma, i was brave enough to move so far from home to somewhere where i knew no-one, i’ve made and maintained friendships and relationships throughout these times, i’ve supported others with similar problems, and i worked really hard at keeping going and at therapy.

I was ill during my final year at Cambridge (and the year before that, only I didn’t realise quite how ill until I broke down at Christmastime). I wrote my final-year dissertation in the space of one night. We had had six months to do it.

I don’t know how I coped. For a long time it was just a strange blur in my head, but now the individual memories are surfacing. I can remember feeling too numb to panic, with my brain flitting from trivial distraction to trivial distraction like a grasshopper. Fortunately my academic staff were very understanding, and I had good support from the Disability Resource Centre.

Now I work in a job that requires no degree, no A-Levels, no GCSEs – just ‘a reasonable standard of literacy and numeracy’. I’m a learning support worker to students with Down’s Syndrome and other cognitive disabilities. And I love every minute. For the first time in many years there has been no pressure on me to be perfect. (That pressure was nearly always self-imposed, but the people around me added to it unwittingly.) A few nights ago one of my students managed to take a bath by himself. He normally requires a lot of support. He was so excited when he came out, and I was excited too – I was capering about and laughing in a way that I haven’t really done since the illness began.

I used to feel almost as though I wasn’t real, that I was experiencing life from behind glass. That was especially true during my second and final years at university. Now I’m slowly coming back.

Thank you all so much for posting your experiences.
I’m amazed by how common this is, I can’t help but feel that we should be making some kind of online resource for students going through this kind of thing.

Vicky, I can really relate to the derealisation you describe – experiencing life from behind glass.

If anyone’s interested, I got my assignments in on time, even got an A for my writing portfolio, which I cam very happy with.
But I’m still not graduated, which I’m finding hard not to be rather upset about. I have one more assignment to hand in, to be best of my knowledge. I was assured I would be able to get an extension for it because of the OCD, but I found out an hour ago my mit circs were rejected. I’m not surprised – my uni are bastards about this stuff – but it does hurt.

This is really late, but I’ve been going through pretty much the same thing as you all.

It’s interesting that Vicky describes it as experiencing life from behind glass. I feel that way too. Have you all read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath? Because that’s pretty much how she describes it as well.

I have only just discovered this website in the course of some research for a novel I am writing. All your comments and thoughts are so keenly expressed, so self-aware, so in depth, and make me feel so sad that the world can’t see you all as you are. Because what strikes me is that there is such a tapestry here, such an amazing myriad of thoughts and feelings…. That your voices are so important, but that they are silenced by your insecurities. Thank you all for the raw honesty you’ve imparted. We each of us often feels alone, mental illness notwithstanding, but when you share your stories, the individual links become chains… but not chains that bind… rather chains that join.